Numbers worth a thousand words

I love the Private Eye's “number crunching” feature. Let's have a look at a few of the recent ones:

£7 billion: Further cuts to UK welfare budget announced last week.

£7 billion: Predicted bonuses to be paid by UK banks this year.

3: Years for which benefits cheats will have payments halted under new rules.

1.5: Years for which Baroness Uddin has been suspended from House of Lords for wrongly claiming £125,000 of taxpayers' money.

And here are a few numbers that have been in the news recently:

795: Years since laws governing Britain's forests were included in the Magna Carta

3: Years in which government plans to sell over 150,000 hectares of state owned forests and other land to the private sector

250 million: Amount expected to be raised from the sales based on current land prices

0.01: Percentage this represents of the government's expenditure (over 3 years)

(And to add some perspective: 517 million: combined annual wage bill of Manchester United, Chelsea, Manchester City and Arsenal. Or: 96 hectares of forest = 1 week's worth of Wayne Rooney. I know which I'd prefer.) 

30 million: Amount the Forestry Commission is subsidised by the government

63 million: Additional income generated by the Forestry Commission

4: Years in which the income from the Forestry Commission would equal the amount raised by 3 years of selling its land

315 million: Value produced each year by 150 thousand hectares of forest (if benefits such as erosion protection, pollution absorption, carbon sequestration and health provision are included).

695 million: Amount lost over three years if 150,000 hectares of forest are sold (based on above annual value)

Fun, huh? But let's not forget: it's not just the forests that the government has their eye on: nature reserves are under scrutiny too.

If you think selling off the forests might not be a good idea, you can sign a petition here. And write to your MP.